Martial arts is akin to rudimentary language: this is something that we can see demonstrated when we view language as a system, and then especially when we apply how culture affects the mechanics of that system. This is also why we can look at various practitioners of the same styles, and then attribute a flavour, or “accent” to someone’s martial arts. Sometimes you get things that are called a certain language, but sounds like another.
For instance, I was once told that my Spanish sounds French, even though they can understand my Spanish. Does that make sense? If you can understand it, maybe it is better to say you’ve made sense of it, as those South Americans made sense of my Espanol.
But the reason I brought this up is because I recall reading an analogy about how non native English speakers tend to be capable of speaking a Pidgin dialect amongst themselves, and can communicate fine. However, they added to the group a native speaker, who can use slang and more advanced expressions of that language, and the others weren’t able to understand them very well, which actually impeded the general flow of conversation in the group even when the native speaker wasn’t directly addressing another person.
In this way, people who come from long lineages of a martial art may have that effect at times from their free form counterparts- we see this in kung fu culture frequently, when the address is primarily on Correctness instead of Cohesion. Maybe this is why innumerable debates arise when comparing the “authenticy” of one’s style.
In the same vein, we also have elitism revolving around lineage as opposed to functionality, or vice versa (which is typically more common in MMA culture). This is case of the practitioner defining their respective style/s.
This ultimately culminates in sparring, which is the heuristic equivalent of a debate, and in this scenario, we see that the person with the better delivery, or being more morphological/syntactical, in their delivery doesn’t necessarily win the match if their opponent has still managed to convey their own ideas, and those ideas are triumphant.
At the end of the day, if we all get together and our aim is to promote conversation, then there must be a degree of inclusivity and intuition regarding how ‘language’ or ‘martial arts’ is idiosyncratically learned, contrasted with the aims of Prescriptivism to preserve the notion of standards and orthodoxy.
-Solomon Li, PhD, is a leading world expert in Practical Neijia, and Martial Arts Philosophy/Anthropology.
Solosopher & Solosophy 